Wireless mobile devices such as cell phones and other devices can now talk to more than one network carrier and switch between differing carrier networks. Differing networks may include differing wireless wide area networks (WWAN) such as differing cellular networks that communicate using different radio access technologies (RATs such as GSM, 4G LTE or other radio access technologies) as well as among wireless local area networks (WLAN) such as Wi-Fi networks. For example, where the wireless mobile device can switch among different carriers of different cellular networks (whether they use the same RAT or different RAT's) the mobile devices may automatically switch between different carriers to connect to another network to improve the strength of the current connection. The connection may be a voice call or data communication for example. Such wireless mobile devices may employ multiple SIM profiles, such as one profile for one carrier and another profile for another carrier. Where the same wireless RAT interface is used for both carriers, the wireless mobile device cannot access both carriers at the same time.
In operation, a mobile device, for example, may request network quality information for a given area from a network quality server that may be available through an internet web server or through one or more of the cellular networks. However, the network quality information is typically cached at a server and is not real time information. The network quality information may be obtained from a wireless network server or other source and may provide information regarding the bandwidth and speed and signal strength of a network at a particular geographic location based on prior network quality tests by the server or may be provided by other mobile devices that were using the network close to the prior location of interest. However, this information may be out of date and if used may result in the phone switching to a less desirable network degrading a user's connectivity.
Without knowing the actual strength of other available networks, wireless mobile devices may have to guess and use heuristics to decide when to switch to a different network. These historical network quality measurements sometimes provided by the network server to mobile devices do not provide real time network quality measurements. In some systems, the wireless mobile device may base its switching decision on signal strength such that if the signal strength of the current network dips below a certain threshold, the wireless device is switched to another network (e.g., from one wide area network to another wide area network having a different carrier, or to a wireless local area such as a Wi-Fi network).
In one example, in a debug mode in a wireless device, a user may be able to manually switch to a different cellular WWAN so when a user has come to believe that there could be a better signal on another network, the user can manually switch. However, this solution typically does not give a user network quality information about another network.